Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream - Ancient Hindu Myths and Personal Story available on Kindle!

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream -
Ancient Hindu Myths and Personal Story
 by Sydney Solis
available on Kindle
Learn about Mythology and Yoga
and how it relates to your personal story

by Sydney Solis

I first performed Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream - Ancient Hindu Myths and Personal Story at the 2005 Boulder Public Library’s Winter Festival of Stories, recounting ancient Hindu myths and interweaving them with my personal life story. It is now available on Kindle as an ebook!

These myths, such as Vishnu’s Dream, The Fabric of Life, Durga and Kali, The Birth of Krishna and more inspire you to begin your own mythic journey and connect with the ancient symbols and metaphors. These point us to our depths to become aware of a personal myth and connection with all the universe. It leads to the ultimate boon: to appreciate your life with awe and recognize that you are one with the divine. That's the power of Mythic Yoga! 

The myths guided me to recount funny childhood stories of my Hare Krishna sister in Boulder, Colorado in the 1970s and my first encounter with yoga and the myths. They also helped me deal with to the tragedy of my husband’s suicide in 2003. It is a journey to ultimate healing using yoga and story. 

You too can find a healing journey with yoga and story by using ancient myth and telling your own story with this ebook. Vedic ayurvedic storytelling even says enlightenment comes from hearing the stories!

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu’s Dream has been used in the Mythic Yoga Studio’s e-course Mythic Yoga: the Story in the Body that is required training for Storytime Yoga® for Kids Teacher Certification. Get inspired to discover your own story in the body using myth, yoga and image. Classes start  Use it to go fishing in your depths and see your life as the dream of narrative for transformation and point you toward ultimate Self-realization and freedom. 

Namaste and Have a Magical Day!

Recommended Reading and Websites

• Receive Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream FREE when you become a member of the League of Yogic Storytellers. Receive premium content, audios and more. 

• Visit the Joseph Campbell Foundation Website.

• Visit the Mythic Journeys website.

• Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion - By Diane K. Osbon - One of my all-time favorites and chock full of great yogi wisdom from Campbell.

• The Power of Myth - The classic Bill Moyers and PBS interviews with Joseph Campbell. As fate would have it, the audio and video team that filmed the series are my next-door neighbors and landlords!

• Our Secret Territory: The Essence of Storytelling by Laura Simms

Mythic Yoga: Dreamwork - Telling the Dream Story of the Body

Mythic Yoga: Dream Work 

Dream work is one of the most powerful yogas. Self-knowledge is revealed when we listen to our dreams, connect with the symbols that bubble up out of the depths and listen to the stories they are revealing.

I have been involved with dream work my whole life, and taught it as part of the Mythic Yoga and Storytime Yoga® Kids Yoga Teacher Training, as teachers must know their own story first and experience transformation before teaching kids. And when we merge the body with the image, profound insight, awareness and healing arise. Just as Vishnu dreams the world into creation, we too awaken every morning and open our eyes and bloom the world into creation. We enter the field of time and space, dreamed by a single dreamer in which we all dream too! Mythic Yoga: Dreamwork - Telling the Dream Story of the Body online classes start Wednesdays August 21 at 8 pm EST on Powhow.com.

We use the body as a vehicle to work with the dreams, exploring the meaning and messages through movement, yoga, meditation, myths and storytelling. JOIN US! Register at the Mythic Yoga Studio on PowHow.com! 

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body - Body Memoirs online class also starts August 24!

Here are some of my favorite books on Dream Work

• Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A. Johnson
• The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life by Jeremy Taylor

• An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols by J.C. Cooper - I don't believe in Dream books, as dream symbols are personal. Yet this book offers a glimpse into universal symbols and is fascinating reading.

Join the League of Yogic Storytellers and Gain Access to these Articles on Mythic Yoga Dream Work by Sydney Solis

• Mythic Yoga: Working with Your Dreams – The Beginnings of Personal Myth

• Mythic Yoga: Working with Your Dreams Video

Life and Death

Mi Chica, Palomita, y su perro, Sergeant Pepe. RIP, 2006-2013.

Forgive me. But I must express my grief. Isn''t that the real source of why we seek the comfort of myths? Isn't that the real reason we wonder beyond the grave? We should be so proud of our neo-lithic ancestors. For that moment when a little dog named Sergeant Pepe, a little black-and-white dog that meant so much to you and your little children is mauled to death by wild dogs on  St. Croix, USVI, mauled to death by dogs who are just as lost, hungry for the truth and sorrowful by abuse by the system that we are forced to find the truth. We cry out in grief. We cry for myth. We cry for healing.

Here is my blog about his death.  May we all find ways to grieve. May we all find ways to heal. May we all find meaning in betrayal, loss and love. May we all find sanctuary in yoga and stories. For they propel us to our Little Piece of Paradise. That transcendental real estate within. 

Healing at the Yoga Farm St. Croix with Yoga and Story

Christiansted, St. Croix, USVI by Sydney Solis 2013

I wrote about my natural healing experience at the Yoga Farm St. Croix on the Mythic Yoga: The Queen of Bohemia Lives in St. Croix blog.

Mythic Yoga: Story in the Body Class 1: BODY MEMOIRS Stories of the Feet

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" The real preparation for education is the study of one's self. The training of the teacher is something far more than the learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit. " - Maria Montessori

Resting on the 100-headed snake Ananda Sesha, Vishnu grows a lotus from his navel. Lakshmi rubs his feet, activating his conscious power with her Shakti.  This is an image that roots us within to our own eternal depths and divine nature. It's an inner prima materi that anchors us to the divine through the myth intuitively. In Mythic Yoga practice, the image evokes something within us to examine our sense of connection to our bodies and lower chakras.

Our feet root our bodies to the energy of the earth.  Through the padha bandha in the foot and the muladhara banda at the base of the pelvis we energetically connect our bodies to the earth. Movement, dance and yoga asana, such as tadasana, with the feet connects us to this greater image of the earth and its powers and our Selves. What’s in the way? High heels for one thing ladies! But more so, memories, dreams reflections! The ones we hold on to at least!

The first class of Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body series started Saturday and we worked with the image of Vishnu and his dream. The 4-week online class features the myths and personal stories in my book Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream - Ancient Hindu Myth and Personal Story. Reflecting on the spoken myth Vishnu’s Dream from the Vishnu Purana, students are inspired to find their own stories via the body and myth. We examined images from our dream life at night and during the day, as well as the dream images from the myth. After asana, a student shared a particularly powerful story from her memory about her foot.

I practice alongside my students, so in my personal Mythic Yoga practice, I have worked with my feet before. The Body Memoir of my Feet video, recalls early trauma to the foot area. Does that memory have any unknown influence in my life? Can I tell something about it and offer it up as art to express myself and shift the relationship and energetics about what happened to me? For our bodies have stories to tell! How do we connect to the earth? Do we or do we not have a feeling of safety? What is the body say? What needs to be expressed? That is the student's challenge.

Additionally we work with dreams and the body.  In my personal practice, I have been having dreams of switching seats with others lately. In one dream, I am on an airplane and let the “retarded” child move to the window seat on the left so that it can be “better connected.”

The dream image reminds me of early woundings in my foot and confidence from recognizing that I had learning disabilities as a child.  I didn’t speak until I was 4 years old, my mother said. My Oma, Dutch grandmother, got me talking. I had severe leg pains growing up. I could never understand math, and remember a particularly humiliating experience in the first grade over math. I had whole gaps in my learning, and remember the first grade class going off somewhere else while I was left behind with the kids with coke-bottle glasses and open mouths.

 I found I excelled at English, however. I was reading Greek myths and books at a 7^th grade level by second grade growing up in Boulder, Colorado. Additionally I was a year or more younger than everybody else in class because my mother “didn’t know what to do with me” so fudged my birth certificate with white out and a copy machine to get me admitted to school early. That “strong suit” of reading made its way onto my Persona, my mask of the true Self.

I act out with movement my dream of the retarded child. I love my retarded self. And there is no retarded self. Never was. It’s just who I am. Just as my daughter, who has struggled with reading and learning disabilities her whole life, now in sixth grade reads at a 9th grade and higher level. She just did things differently. As do I! My shadow can come out now! I love Truman Capote’s quote. “I am an alcoholic. I am a drug addict. I am a homosexual. I am a genius.”

Looking at my "retarded" child connects me to all of my self. It is part of my shadow. So may we all love our shadows, find out who they are, offer them a cup of tea, make friends with them, tell stories about them and offer them up as art in honor of life. May we befriend and move with all parts of ourselves to get connected in a better seat of life! Tell Your Story in the Body!

Read more Mythic Yoga work and connect with others in League of Yogic Storytellers! Join today!

Join the Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Online class with Sydney Solis at the Mythic Yoga Studio on PowHow.com.

SUGGESTED READING
Jung and Yoga: The Psyche-Body Connection by Judith Harris 
The Inner Journey: Views from the Hindu Tradition, Edited by Margaret H. Case PARABOLA anthology Series

 Know Thy Self with Mythic Yoga then teach yoga and tell stories to little kids with Storytime Yoga!

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Online Classes April 27-May 18

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The Mythic Yoga Studio: The Story in the Body

Know Thy Self! 

Join Storyteller and Yoga Teacher Sydney Solis for 

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body Online classes April 27-May 18.

Use dreams, myth, the body and personal storytelling for self-discovery and transformation! 

Four Saturdays April 27- May 18. 1 pm EDT. 

Join from anywhere in the world as it's online at the Mythic Yoga Studio on Powhow!

This is the first time Sydney presents the popular e-course Mythic Yoga on Powhow!  Each class features movement, yoga, contemplation and a different Hindu myth that guide you through life's stages to bring your life's story into awareness and to create a Body Myth. Bring a dream you’ve had and would like to work with, a notebook, your body and your listening ears to journey within, bring awareness to issues and discover your personal myth!

Required course for Storytime Yoga Teacher Certification.  Withdraw your projections to empower yourself and also so you don’t put them on the kids or others you work or live with!

Register for all four classes and save 20%!

League of Yogic Storytellers Members receive 50% off all classes!

• Purchase the Mythic Yoga at home course and go deeper to discover your own myth using the body, the word and active imagination.

Mythic Yoga: Telling the Dream Story of the Body

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When Marduk  slays Tiamat and pins half her snake body up as the four-corners of the sky and makes the other half the earth, he is creating order from chaos. In this Babylonian myth, Marduk is conquering his symbiosis with the feminine chaos, mother serpentine, watery realm of the unconscious, and creating a container in which to hold the conscious world. He is asserting himself away from the all-devouring mother, creating his ego and assertion that he exists and has an “I”. To do that he has to slay the Mother, the feminine., as many mythologies, such as the Aztec Huitzilopochtli, seek to do.

Read more about Mythic Yoga: Telling the Dream Story of the Body when you become a member of the League of Yogic Storytellers! (LOYS)